The third annual Everybody Eats conference, last Friday
and Saturday at Pattengill Middle School in Lansing, was a hotbed of
healthy food ideas designed to take nutrition to the streets.

Joy Baldwin, food systems project
manager for NorthWest Initiative, is working on a healthier alternative
to the neighborhood ice cream truck. The idea, Baldwin said, is to fund
a food truck — complete with catchy jingles echoing through streets and
into backyards — that will sell produce and other nutritious staples in
“food deserts,” underserved or at-risk communities where healthy food
is scarce.

“We want to use a cardiac disease map and overlay it with
a food desert map to find the areas we might have the most impact,”
Baldwin said.

The Everybody Eats conference was designed to foster
conversations among citizens, consumers, growers, producers, and anyone
else with an interest in the region’s food systems, and that’s just
what happened. About 300 people turned out for the two-day event,
generating a buzz that organizers hope will grow.

Everybody eats, but we don’t always talk about food, and
there are questions to be answered. Where do supermarket eggs come
from? Can I find local tomatoes in the winter? How do I go about
selling that extra squash my garden produces? And why does the food I
see at my neighborhood store seem to come only in a box and saturated
with sodium or sugar?

Baldwin said the conference filled a crying need. “There
was nothing that brought everyone together to talk about these kinds of
food and food access issues,” Baldwin said. The planning committee for
the Everybody Eats movement, including Baldwin, works on multiple
fronts, fighting political apathy about food issues, improving school
lunch programs, making community gardens more accessible and helping
start-ups and entrepreneurs with an “incubake” community kitchen.

“Cultivating food democracy” was the theme of this year’s
conference. Everyone has a right to nutritious food, Baldwin said, but
not everybody lives within walking distance (defined as 5 miles or
less) of a store that offers fresh produce. What is worse, the
inhabitants of “food deserts” are also the most likely to lack
transportation.

“The last data I saw showed that 32 percent of people in Lansing do not own a vehicle,” Baldwin said.

Katherine Kelly, executive director of Cultivate Kansas
City, was the keynote speaker Friday evening. Kelly’s work in Kansas
City includes growing organic food on a two-acre farm, supporting urban
farms and farmers, and reaching out to the community to provide
information and advice on eating healthy, natural food.

Over the past few decades, Kelly said, an increasing
number of people have become separated from food production. Many city
dwellers have grown up and lived in a world where farming and food
production is done far away, out of sight and out of mind.

She praised community gardens and urban farming in Lansing for embracing “appropriately scaled entrepreneurial farming.”

“We need to make growing and eating healthy food the norm,” she said.

On Saturday, the conference offered nearly two dozen
forums and presentations on issues such as local fair trade, marketing
and distribution concerns for food growers, rain catchment in the city,
food policy and recent legislation.

Organizers hope events like the Everybody Eats conference
will build the social and cultural critical mass needed to change the
region’s food systems.

Kelly told the Lansing audience that committed, engaged
people can work together to find food system solutions that can change
the world, or at least their corner of it.

This region, she said, can also become a model for other
communities, but it won’t be easy. “There is no one fix to this,” Kelly
said. “That’s what makes it a grassroots movement.”